NEWS

Registration Open for the Certified Professional Development Programme for Gender Trainers

10 May 2017

The UN Women Training Centre has partnered with the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) to deliver a Certified Professional Development Programme for Gender Trainers. This certification is a 6-month programme that aims to reposition training for gender equality as a strategy to challenge and engender mainstream development and support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The programme will be held October 23 2017 – 20 April 2018, and will include two face-to-face workshops in Amsterdam, Netherlands, moderated online sessions and virtual mentoring and networking. The deadline to apply is 31 July 2017.

The programme works in a co-creation process with experienced gender trainers from both the global south and north who:

Have a minimum of three years of training experience on gender issues.

Have knowledge of gender and development and gender in public policy.

Have an institutional affiliation/experience: UN agencies, international and national NGOs, national governments, academia, etc.

Demonstrate commitment to completing the six-month process of professional development.

This training programme is the result of one of the recommendation from the UN Women Training Centre 2015 Expert Group Meeting on Training for Gender Equality, which suggested to review the way gender trainers are trained and developed to address the need for feminist ideals and conceptual basis of gender and development in gender training.

The training grounds itself in key concepts so that participants can apply these in diverse settings rather than assuming that one size fits all as is often the case in most gender training practice. It draws from the UNWTC and KIT’s overall approach of training for gender equality as a feminist project and concerns feminist knowledge transfer. It offers exposure to new ideas and new ways of working and seeks to inspire participants to step out of their comfort zones and experiment, all in a safe and reflexive environment. Successful participants will be granted a certificate by KIT and UN Women Training Centre.

Click the flyer below for complete info and pricing details:

Open Webinar: Sticky Issues for Gender Trainers

Since the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995, gender training remains a key policy and programme response to address a wide range of perceived needs to make gender mainstreaming happen. In many respects, it has become a cure-all to address the many challenges gender mainstreaming entails. Repeated calls for gender training reflect a 'more of the same but better' approach to addressing the limitations of gender mainstreaming (Milward et al., 2015).

What has now become evident is how complicit gender experts (Prügl, 2013) and the gender knowledge they broker, under the auspices of gender mainstreaming and gender training, have contributed to the undermining the transformatory aims originally envisioned. As gender experts, including trainers, and gender expertise have become embedded in development cooperation, it has "not always [been] in the ways that feminists would have liked" (Mukhopadhyay, 2016).

This webinar speaks to some of the sticky issues faced by gender trainers who, on the one hand, see themselves as agents of change, but, on the other, are often ensconced in the very institutions in which they are seeking to transform. The presentation and ensuing discussion lays of the basis for the rationale for and thinking behind the Professional Development Programme for Gender Trainers being offered by UN Women and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in 2017 and 2018.